Thursday, September 27, 2007

Does anybody know of a good print journal that likes to publish work that is simultaneously ridiculous/funny/grotesque? I am about to finish a story about the beginning of a new apocalypse on the TV show Friends, but I have no idea who would want it. It is too long to be online.

Check out the poem and the site and while you're at it, submit something. It looks like it is going to be nice.

To receive this publication I forced a screwdriver into my left nostril until I felt a puncture. I crawled along the floor and sniffed my brain up full with itch and I went to the white wall in my mother's kitchen and sneezed her portrait. For her hair, I used the darker blood. For her eyes, I kicked out holes. For her voice, I lay and waited and am waiting and will wait.

Began rereading 'Notable American Women' today. I do remember that the opening letter from Ben's father is a bit slowgoing as an opening, but still made me laugh and/or amused and/or provoked.

Here is a quote I like from that section (pg 15), which is pretty definitive of the language used here (one of the main reasons I admire the book):

"A father is pleased anytime a son can regulate his busily superficial mind for the time required to command a book's worth of language to the page. Such a feat is particularly notable, given the aforementioned mental challenges of the son, when it can barely be expected that the son remember to bring potatoes to the underground area where his father waits to be fed. When his only task is to bring a potato to his goddamned father, or to let new air into his father's area, where the old air has already been used, because there is a living man down here!, or to to walk his father up above when his father has gone months, motherfucker, without seeing a house, a stick, a bird, a window, a road, the key objects of our time, when his father has no new air to clean his eyes and rid his skin of the language fluid poured in by the man with the tube, who speaks his Sentences of Menace, trying to burst the father's body with words. Let a man wash himself, and stride in the open air, for fuck's sake! Given his systematic incompetence and neglect of the one person he was born to live, how can a single word from Ben Marcus's rotten, filthy heart be trusted?"

Strange, yes, and non-narrative, but I think the passage is funny and works well, particularly leading into the surrealist text that follows.

While searching earlier today I found an interesting list of writing prompts Marcus used with his students while teaching at Brown. read here. some of them are clearly generative of Notable American Women itself, particularly #5: Design a religion. This could include a theory of creation (How did we get here? How did something come from nothing?), a system of rules and punishments, moral do’s and don’ts, clothing, architecture, prayers, etc.. You could instead write a story in which the characters practice a new religion — it does not have to be the subject of the story, but it can be used to generate interesting behaviors and ideas in your work. If you think of religion as a successful fiction — a set of provocative ideas that have satisfied the hardest questions of a group of people — you might better determine how to make a religion that might come close to satisfying you. When we consider the fiction writer as someone who provides necessary myths to the culture, we see that devising a religion might very well be an appropriate task.

I don't much like writing to prompts myself, but they can be useful for thinking sometimes, and interesting at least to apply to Marcus's thought process in his own work.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Okay, I think I'm going to stop with the porn references intended to generate traffic. It's getting a little out of hand.

From today only, keywords that brought people to my site: shitting links, i fucked my butler, boy erection, boy erections, how does the rectum work and diagram, erections in showers, shitting, pamela porn, right tit bigger than left?

Can you get flagged by the government from people landing on your site looking for child porn when you were just kidding?

Saturday, September 22, 2007

An excerpt from my unfinished and currently by the wayside novel INVISIBLE ERRORS is now live up at WANDERING ARMY. The novel is about an accused pedophile who is not really a pedophile. This excerpt is from somewhere in the middle. I don't know if I'll ever finish the novel. I don't know if I'll ever finish anything. Or that anything can be finished. Or that birds eat seed.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

A couple of my friends in Atlanta are starting a new art/literary magazine and are looking for submissions of all kinds of stuff. You should send them something. Check it out here. They are trying to get things together by the end of the month but there's still a lot they are looking for, so it'd be a good chance to see print without having to fellate or massage or stroke anyone or anything, know what I mean?

Today I got an email from the web journal Exquisite Corpse about a short thing I sent them in January 2006. I ended up withdrawing it a couple weeks later as it was published here. Here is what their 21 month-long reply said: Corpse is against feces. Sorry, eds

Cute, dudes.

I sent them back a brief rejection letter rejection letter: Blake is against responses for submissions sent more than 21 months ago and already withdrawn. Sorry, b

There is a new release from Calamari Press available now and it looks pretty cool.

I found I have an extra copy of Gordon Lish's PERU. If anyone wants to trade for it or just wants it for free, let me know.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The new issue of NOÖ Journal is now up: [seven]. It has a lot of excellent people in it including Robert Lopez, Mazie Louise Montgomery, Norman Ball and a bunch of others.

I have another list in it. List Prayer. You should look at it and leave comments there so I feel enabled and engaged. The print version is forthcoming.

I had a job when I wrote this. I wrote it in one sitting in my Gmail browser while answering phonecalls from people who could not afford to pay their bills.

Thanks to Mike Young for another excellent issue. Mike Young writes great emails.

To receive this publication I lay facedown in a field with seven children with cleft facial abnormalities (a cleft upper lip, a cleft nostril, a cleft ear and a cleft face) for 37 hours while listening to Rosie O'Donnell sing a cover version of 'American Pie' in duet with the fat guy from Stain'd on repeat over loudspeakers and chewing tacky glue.

today i went to the grocery to buy ice cream and the guy who checked me out was a guy i remember from the years i was a boy scout. he was 5-6 years older than me and finishing his eagle badge when i was just getting started.

for some reason i vividly remember when we went on a camping trip to pensacola to sleep on a navy base. we went out and did some boy scout-ish type shit like rappelling or digging or climbing over dirt and then we were all dirty and supposed to shower. there were about thirty of us aged 12-15 naked in the navy base showers. the showers were large and wide and open and had no blinders and you could see into them even from outside where the lockers were.

for some reason i vividly remember this particular eagle scout, scrawny and pale and glasses-wearing and femininely voiced, standing near the front of the showers completely nude, without even a towel wrapped around him, staring wide-eyed and unashamedly straight on into the showers with a full ungroomed erection. he stood there while others passed by him coming in and out and he stood there with his hips slightly jutted forward and he stood there with an erection i can still for some reason vividly remember sticking straight up out into the air while he watched me and those other boys washing ourselves.

nobody said anything about it.

later he completed his eagle badge by building picnic tables for a homeless shelter.

now almost 15 years later, he works a register at kroger and is mostly bald and looks sixty years old.

he did not recognize me, or if he did, he did not show any signs of such.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

there is a new issue of Smokelong Quarterly now online. i am kind of confused by it. if anyone else looks at the stories published and understands what might have confused me and can explain it to me, please do.

i want to buy 'Angle of Yaw' by Ben Lerner but they didn't have it at the 'indie' borders or any of the mom and pop stores in town. i don't like ordering books from the internet because it takes too long. but i guess i'm going to do that.

i reread Tao Lin's story 'The Walking Wall' again today. it was the first story of his i ever came across back whenever. i still think it is one of my favorites.

i got a rejection from blackbird yesterday for something i sent them a year ago and eventually withdrew.

blackbird is doing really good work.

two nights ago i called the cops on my neighbor who may or may not have tourette's after he spent the whole day shrieking and yelping and going EIEIEIE and pounding on shit and yelling at his dog. finally his boyfriend came over and they started fucking at 3 AM with their windows open and the curtains up. he was screaming even more in his tourette's style plus the sound of getting fucked. i had been pounding all the walls throughout the day when his screeching got too much to handle and have done so in the past and he knows very well i can hear him and yet he still decides to make emotional screeching and gibberish sounds while he is getting fucked at 3 AM. it is likely that he likes me to hear him getting fucked. i called the atlanta police. the lady answering the police phone sounded like she'd been having an in-depth conversation with an attractive coworker and was irritated to have to take my call. she agreed to send a cop car. i left my house after calling because i didn't want to see what happened but immediately afterward, while at my parents house eating raisins, i wished i'd stayed to see the cops arrive and find them butt-ass naked on the kitchen table going EIHJROEIHROEIHROEHJ!

Monday, September 17, 2007

A couple weeks ago I interviewed Robert Lopez about his novel PART OF THE WORLD. You can read it now at Word Riot.

If you haven't yet picked up a copy of his book, you really should. It has short nice sentences and is funny and strange and you pretty much have no choice but to read straight through it. My full review will be coming soon in Rain Taxi.

You can find out more about the novel from at its publisher's page: Calamari Press, who I think is by far publishing more great work than any other small press around right now.

Friday, September 14, 2007

i am sitting in my loft with all the lights off because i am too lazy to turn them on. i have a cup of coffee that is getting cold. i ate a bunch of cotton candy that my friend bought for me. last night on cribs some kids in a rap group were talking about CITY PUNCH, which is water with sugar in it. they were very proud of CITY PUNCH. i would like to drink it. there are these windows along the back wall of my loft that let the sound in from the train rails that are right across from my front door. it often makes a sound like a sprinkler head ticking. or like something is itching. i hate friday night. friday night always makes me feel anxious because i am not a planner and yet if you do not go out on friday night there is some feeling of impending loneliness or isolation because friday night is the night people with regular jobs really feel special about being alive. i would like to eat watermelon at a short table with a tablecloth in the parking lot of my apartment with a napkin tucked in to keep watermelon juice from getting on my shirt though i would probably get it on my shirt somehow anyway. friday night makes me feel violent. i want to be violent more often but i do not have the proper mental configuration to allow me to commit violence. i have never been in a fight. i think i would like to be in a fight if it could be like when people fight in video games and i could hit reset if i really started to get my ass kicked. i like that movie STRAW DOGS. sam peckinpah knows how to make violence feel more volatile and jarring. watching that movie gave me genuine anxiety. it is probably one of the most anxious films i've ever seen. PUNCH DRUNK LOVE also caused that feeling, though it used sound and color to create the disturbance more than STRAW DOGS does. STRAW DOGS has DUSTIN HOFFMAN as a mathematician with a hot wife. they move out to live in a small town in a large house where DUSTIN HOFFMAN begins to feel strange and jealous about his wife being hot and the people in the town lusting after her and then strange things begin to happen. it is a movie full of jealousy and violence. there is a very famous rape scene. i often feel pangs of real guttural jealousy that are often attached to no credible real motion. my head creates a lot of trouble for me out of things that do not fully exist. it works often kind of like those MAGIC EYE paintings, where you're supposed to stare into the mesh of nonsense and see something iconic like a sailboat or a landscape. i think MAGIC EYE paintings cause emotional disturbance. i think MAGIC EYE paintings should not be allowed to be sold in malls. i think instead they should sell chickadees. all people should have the opportunity to live with a chickadee.

i think i'd always feel okay if i had a chickadee.i am going to buy at least a stuffed one.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

you can now preorder the 12th issue of Quick Fiction via their website. i have a piece 'Gravel' in the issue. it also features the work of awesome people like Chris Bachelder, Kim Chinquee, Girijia Tropp, Matthew Purdy and Seth Fried, among others.

The day the sky rained gravel I watched it drum my father's car. A Corvette he'd spent years rebuilding. He'd liked to watch his face gleam in the hood. He kissed the key before ignition. He read the owner's manual aloud. When he lost the strength to stand he left it uncovered in the street.

to read the rest, buy up the issue. i am excited about its arrival.

in order to receive this publication i photocopied my testicles and enlarged them using the resize function on my mother's HP PSC 500 printer until they were each the size of a small room. i then express mailed copies in pink leather valises to 15 regional senators and heads of state, who i promised i would tattoo their next campaign slogan on my scrotum if they agreed to write to jennifer and adam pieroni and demand acceptance of my story.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Got my contributor copy of the new issue of Burnside Review, which is really beautiful and full of awesome work by Paul Guest, Ben Lerner, Leslie Jamison, and many others. My piece is another list, #17, this one titled BIRTHDAY. Here are the first few lines as a teaser:

1. I can feel my teeth rotting in my head.2. Showered so long under such hot water this morning my skin wanted to rip.3. Unable to see myself in the mirror, after, for the steam; then, suddenly: my eyes.4. Somehow it seems a long time since I looked.5. Today my body is one year older.6. Only actually one day older, literally, but a year in symbolic terms, which is bad enough.7. Some days the morning is too much but today I kind of greet it.8. If 2 PM can be considered morning still, which I'm sure, of course, it cannot.9. I hardly remember my last few birthdays, and not because of drinking.10. Even when one remembers something one did not remember one remembered, one may have still no more than scratched the surface in regard to things one does not remember one remembers. - David Markson11. I feel I don't remember many people.12. Even the people I do remember often feel so far gone they're hardly there.

If'n you'd like to read the rest you should buy a copy. It is $8 for a copy and you can get it here. I really like the cover:

To receive this publication, I massaged mayonnaise onto the serrated back of a cambodian male prostitute who'd once seen his father trampled underfoot by enormous geese.

Monday, September 3, 2007

I'm pretty excited about this year's Best American Essays 2007 collection. It is 'guest edited' by David Foster Wallace, who I still revere as one of the greatest working writers. He wrote an introduction to the book about the 'editing' process for Best American, which you can read online at the publisher's website: DFW intro.

He spends most of his time discussing the morals of using the term 'best' and the ideas of 'bias' and terms of 'inclusion'. Here are two quotes:

"In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help."

"‘Biased’ is, of course, the really front-loaded term here, the one that I expect Houghton Mifflin winces at and would prefer not to see uttered in the editor’s intro even in the most reassuring context, since the rhetoric of such reassurances can be self-nullifying (as in, say, running a classified ad for oneself as a babysitter and putting ‘don’t worry — not a pedophile!’ at the bottom of the ad). "

I'm excited to see what he's assembled, regardless of how constrained it was, though I'll be surprised if it comes anywhere near THE NEXT AMERICAN ESSAY edited by John D'Agata, which if you are interested in writing essays, you should buy immediately.

On another topic of 'bias,' I was recently unmasked by this blog, who has finally unearthed the secret that I am part of an underground conspiracy of writers who all publish each other.

I found it kind of amusing, mostly in that the author simultaneously wondered (a) why he hasn't published that much and (b) why he hasn't heard of all these 'underground' journals that are linked on this blog.

Little does he know, if you wait long enough, even Zoetrope: All Story will come knocking on your door, begging for a bejeweled nugget of your mind to print on their nihilist secret-handshake papyrus.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

the sporadic search engine content i've placed on this blog to result in excess traffic is beginning to make me feel weird. today someone found this site by looking up: 'sister licks her preteen sister's pussy.' whoops. i'm not sure what i wrote earlier that caused that one, but wow.

the internet.

rereading BLOOD MERIDIAN again is making me feel anxious and kind of bloodthirsty. last night, after being ditched by a friend for drink plans, i went to videodrome and got two very violent films. THE GREAT SILENCE starring Klaus Kinski, a spaghetti western with bounty killers and probably the most grim ending to a film i've ever seen, and COCKFIGHTER, a Monte Hellman film with Harry Dean Stanton about cockfighters. the footage of the cockfights was insane and very real. one scene had two cocks going at it in a small hotel room in slow motion. interesting film.

i wonder what kind of google hits that last paragraph is going to generate.